Watched “It” yesterday. Definitely agree with everybody who says it was too much just a sequence of scares, with too little story to connect them.

Visually, there were a lot of moments I liked. Pennywise is very neatly done, and I think their focus in how to present him was that he is an alien presence. One of the people I watched it with said she found Tim Curry scarier because he did more, but I think that’s kind of the point: Pennywise isn’t a person who turned into this, but he’s an alien presence trying to (badly) emulate human interaction. At least I think what Skarsgard and the director were going for was something like this.

Anyway, some neat moments, but they didn’t really manage to get the kids and their world to feel alive, but only like transitions to the next scare. So that’s a pretty clear failure.

I also still think you give away too much of what made “It” special by putting the teenage and the adult world into different movies. Although I can understand the problems you’d face in doing it any other way.

I really wish Fukanaga got to make his version it sounds like the opposite of what they ended up with:

Fukunaga: “I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. It didn’t fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience. Our budget was perfectly fine. We were always hovering at the $32 million mark, which was their budget. It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies. They didn’t care about that. In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters. They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. I wrote the script. They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.

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“The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown. After 30 years of villains that could read the emotional minds of characters and scare them, trying to find really sadistic and intelligent ways he scares children, and also the children had real lives prior to being scared. And all that character work takes time. It’s a slow build, but it’s worth it, especially by the second film. But definitely even in the first film, it pays off.

“It was being rejected. Every little thing was being rejected and asked for changes. Our conversations weren’t dramatic. It was just quietly acrimonious. We didn’t want to make the same movie. We’d already spent millions on pre-production. I certainly did not want to make a movie where I was being micro-managed all the way through production, so I couldn’t be free to actually make something good for them. I never desire to screw something up. I desire to make something as good as possible.

“We invested years and so much anecdotal storytelling in it. Chase and I both put our childhood in that story. So our biggest fear was they were going to take our script and bastardize it. So I’m actually thankful that they are going to rewrite the script. I wouldn’t want them to stealing our childhood memories and using that. I mean, I’m not sure if the fans would have liked what I would had done. I was honoring King’s spirit of it, but I needed to update it. King saw an earlier draft and liked it.”

I really wish Fukanaga got to make his version it sounds like the opposite of what they ended up with:

I was so disappointed when he left the project. I’ve long considered Fukanaga the best horror director out there who’s never actually directed a horror film. I think he would have delivered something pretty special instead of the standard Hollywood horror fluff we got. I still enjoyed It, but pretty much solely because the kids were great.